With the arrest of The Times journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika yesterday, concerns have been raised about press freedom, freedom of speech and other niggly little things that we take for granted. (Edit: Especially since he is being held by police after the case has been thrown out of court. Claims of Detention without Trial are the order of the day on Twitter) (Edit Edit: The Hawks spokesperson came out and said wa Afrika will be in court tomorrow. Basically, no one knows what the fuck is going on. Stay tuned for more confusion)

Now this may make me unpopular considering the fact that the South African twittersphere went befuck over all this yesterday and were in full on Chicken Little mode.

This incident highlighted plans that the ANC want to push forward: Having a media tribunal and the proposed Protection of Information bill – which, while in theory could do some good, will most likely be abused to protect the corrupt.

While I do feel what the ANC is doing is wrong, I’m not surprised. They are a party that have always favoured communist ideals – but not in it’s purist sense because that would mean giving up their luxuries, so basically everyone in the country would have to share except those big boys.

Now let’s look at the current communist states: China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam.

China – The government has a policy of censoring the internet and other media on a routine basis to silence any criticism of the government. Just look at the recent Google nonsense.They have the biggest prison in the world for journalists.

Cuba – Second biggest prison in the world for journalists. If you don’t know about their other human rights violations to silence opposition and criticism, you need to come out of your little bubble.

North Korea – Do I really need to say anything? Sigh. The media is strictly controlled by the government. Only news that paints the current regime in a good light is allowed. What makes them really interesting is that their constitution provides for freedom of speech, much like ours, but the government gets to choose when they want to prohibit these rights.

Laos – All newspapers are published BY the government. Oh dear.

Vietnam – What a surprise, their media is controlled by the government to make sure it follows the official communist blah blah blah.

So now, why would you be surprised that a government who has always favoured the ideals of communism and socialism (but try and implement them like every other power hungry politician ever has) would follow suite and want to have the same control? We have the nationalisation of our mines on the table, why not try the media censorship thing next?

I’m also going to slip into conspiracy theorist mode for a second here. Isn’t it far too convenient that the journalist arrested was in fact fired once before by the Sunday Times for bringing their credibility under dispute? You just know that will be brought up by the government and it will lend it’s own credibility to their plans.

Here’s the really bad news for you. The rest of the world doesn’t care.

While it’s extremely unlikely that the world would let this country get as bad as Zimbabwe, no matter how much JuJu idolises Mugabe, when it comes to things like censorship and press freedom, they aren’t that concerned when there is other bigger news to report on.

A good example is Selebi and his trial. Our own media claims that it garnered plenty of international coverage. You know what, in certain elite circles it may have, but speaking to many of those overseas, no such news makes it in newspapers.

What I’m really trying to say with all of this is that we’re probably on our own here. We have to fight this battle ourselves. We can’t depend on ill-conceived campaigns of joining some facebook group and just voicing our dissatisfaction from the comfort of our desks – if this is something that goes further then we have to do things the African way – strike, toyi-toyi and make one hell of a racket until we get noticed.